«I want to go home and do my hair in sausage-curls,» Nina said challengingly. She couldn't risk making a mistake this time.
«What did you say? Do your hair in what?» He jumped up and down at the prospect of hearing the word again.
«Sausage-curls,» Nina repeated obstinately.
«Ooh!» He doubled up with laughter. «Ooh!» he groaned, trying to straighten up, but spluttering helplessly. «O-o-h!» A fresh bout nearly laid him low again, but he managed to control himself. «Help! Save me! Don't mention that word again or I'll die.» His face quivered, threatening another convulsion. Straining every nerve, he somehow contrived to avoid total collapse. «A man who laughs all the time is a happy man. Don't you think?»
Nina smiled in spite of herself. People vary. One man can become furious and tear his hair, while another will split his sides laughing, and no one can say which is best, which worst. Better put it out of your mind, not think about it, for there's no knowing where it might lead. Let him have his laugh. Why should she mind?
LUDMILA ULITSKAYA
WOMEN'S LIES
Translated by Arch Tait.
How can anyone compare the big, manly lie — strategic, architectural, as old as Cain's riposte — with the sweet ad-libbing fibbing of woman — blameless, shameless, innocent of guile?
Behold the regal couple, Odysseus and Penelope. Not much of a kingdom, perhaps. Thirty homesteads. Little more than a village really. Goats in the pen, no mention of chickens. They probably haven't been domesticated yet. The queen churns cheese and weaves rugs. Pardon me, shrouds. Okay, she is from a good family. Her uncle is another king; her cousin is the Helen who launched the bitterest wars of classical antiquity. Actually, Odysseus was one of Helen's suitors until he weighed up pro and contra and married, not the most beautiful woman, not the super-model of uncertain morality, but canny Penelope who into her dotage bored everyone stupid with her ostentatious and, even then, old-fashioned marital fidelity. And this while he, renowned for his stratagems, capable of competing in craftiness and cunning with the very gods, as Pallas Athena herself attests, is supposedly wending his way back home. For decades he cruises the Mediterranean, making off with sacred relics, seducing sorceresses, queens and their maidservants, the legendary liar of those antediluvian times when the wheel, the oar and the distaff had already been invented, but conscience hadn't. In the end the gods decide they'd better facilitate his return to Ithaca for fear that, if they don't play ball, he may return to his village anyway, in defiance of Fate, and thereby put the Olympians to shame.
Meanwhile, back at home, our aging, simple-hearted deceiver unpicks her day's weaving every night, dulls with tears the eyes so bright in the days of her youth, presses to her sagging, unneeded breasts the joints of thin fingers disfigured by arthritis, and drives away all the suitors whose interest for many years now has been solely in her royal, if modest, possessions, and not at all in her faded charms. Foolish womanly stubbornness. To be absolutely truthful, she isn't even a good liar. Her deception is uncovered. Before you know it, they will be deriding this decent, elderly woman, giving her in marriage to the most lustful of studs.
In the end Odysseus achieved all his heart desired: he conned his way into the culture of mankind just as he once had into the Trojan horse; he left his traces in every sea, scattering his seed over many islands; he abandoned everyone, only to return in due course to his royal duties and beloved homeland. He deceived everybody with whom Fate brought him into contact. Except for Fate herself: one fine autumn day, a young hero moored on the coast of Ithaca in search of the father who had abandoned him and, in a case of mistaken identity, mortally wounded his own dad, leaving just enough of a gap between life and death for the final explanation. So runs one version of the myth of Odysseus. But despite the predestined ultimate misfortune which is the lot of all mortals, Odysseus has remained a hero for the ages, as a great liar, adventurer and seducer. How masterfully he contrived his deceits. He anticipated his opponents' line of thought, then raced ahead, outflanked, excelled, entrapped and vanquished them! He ran rings round the sorceress Circe herself. This is how he is inscribed in the memory of the nations, as a consummate designer and architect of lies.
Penelope ended up with nothing. There she had sat, recycling her yarn, weaving and unpicking, and her lying, like her handiwork, was as well formed as it was duplicitous. Yet for all her best efforts over those years, she has been allotted no place as prominent as that of her husband or her cousin. She was lacking in some special, feminine gift of mendacity. And yet the fibbing of woman, unlike the pragmatic lying of man, is a highly rewarding topic. Women do everything differently: alternative thinking, feeling, suffering — and lying.
And God in heaven, how they lie! Those, that is, who unlike Penelope do have the gift. En passant, unintentionally, purposelessly, passionately, suddenly, surreptitiously, irrationally, desperately, and simply for no reason at all. Those who have the gift lie from the first words they utter to the last. And how enchantingly, how artistically, how innocently and brazenly. What creative inspiration! What eclat! Here is no scope for cunning, self-interest, or premeditation. This is a song, a fairy tale, a riddle. But a riddle without an answer. The lying of woman is as much a natural phenomenon as milk, or a birch tree, or a bumblebee.
Just like every disease, so every lie has its aetiology. With hereditary predisposition or without. As rare as cardiac cancer or as common as chickenpox. It can have all the characteristics of an epidemic, a kind of social lie which suddenly lays low almost all the members of a woman's enterprise, a kindergarten, say, or a hairdressing salon, or some other entity, most of whose members are women.
We propose, then, a brief literary investigation of the topic, with no claims to offer a complete or even a partial answer.
The child resembled a hedgehog, with his stiff, spiky black hair, a curious long nose which narrowed at the end, and the droll ways of a self-reliant being constantly sniffing things out; with his total impregnability also to affection, to being touched, to say nothing of a mother's kiss. But his mother too, as far as one could tell, was a hedgehog kind of person herself. She made no attempt to touch him, not even proffering a hand as they were coming back up the steep path from the beach to the house. So he scrambled up in front of her, and she slowly followed behind, leaving him to clutch at tufts of grass for himself, to pull himself up, to slither back, and go straight on up again to the house, shunning the smooth turn of the road along which any normal holidaymaker would have walked. He was not yet even three, but had such an emphatic, independent personality, that his mother herself sometimes forgot he was still almost a baby and treated him like a grown man, expecting him to help and look after her, before coming back to reality and putting the baby on her knees, and bouncing him gently as she recited, «Let's go berry picking, let's go berry picking», while he shrieked with laughter as he fell between her knees into the taut lap of his mother's skirt.
«Sasha, Sasha, eat your kasha!» mother teased him.
«Mummy, mummy, big fat tummy,» he responded delightedly.
This was how the two of them had lived together for one whole week, renting the smallest of the rooms while the others, scrubbed and readied, awaited their occupants. It was the middle of May and the holiday season was just beginning. A bit cool, and too early still for sea bathing, but the southern vegetation had not yet coarsened or faded, and the mornings were so clear and pure that, from that first day when Zhenya had chanced to wake at dawn, she hadn't missed a single sunrise, a daily spectacle she had not previously appreciated. They were getting along so happily and so easily that Zhenya even began to doubt the prognoses the child psychiatrists had come up with for her boisterous and highly strung little boy. He hadn't been making scenes, hadn't been having temper tantrums, and could probably have been described as well-behaved had Zhenya had any clear notion of what good behaviour consisted of.